Summary: Factoid Question Answering over Unstructured and Structured
Web Content
Silviu Cucerzan and Eugene Agichtein
Microsoft Research
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
{silviu,eugeneag}@microsoft.com
Abstract
We describe our experience with two new, built-
from-scratch, web-based question answering sys-
tems applied to the TREC 2005 Main Question
Answering task, which use complementary models
of answering questions over both structured and
unstructured content on the Web. Our approaches
depart from previous question answering (QA)
work in several ways. For unstructured content, we
used a web-based system with novel features such
as web snippet pattern matching and generic an-
swer type matching using web counts. We also ex-
perimented with a new, complementary question